Is Sue de Beer growing up? In The Quickening, the artist shifts her
fixation from late-20th-century adolescence to the era of Purtian New
England. Her new video - installed in a shag-carpeted, red-walled room
complete with dropped ceiling - features lovely young women attired in
18th-century millinery, gray and scarlet frocks, and hyper-fashionable
high heels being stalked by a faceless killer. At first, the action
suggests an exploration of female sexual power and its repression. The
ensuing half hour, however, shot in de Beer's now-signature style of
low-rent horror films, is more mystifying than enlightening as it layers
reference upon reference.

In one particularly trippy sequence, the would-be killer is lulled into
a trance in which he envisions one of his victims as a forest
nymph/housewife who takes time to dance with dangerous animals while
sweeping leaves from a woodland floor. A catalog essay by Kim Paice
explains that "his visions allow us to understand the creativity of
magic, sexuality, and art as social resistance." Possibly, though
viewers unversed in De Beer's sources - Puritan sermons by Jonathan
Edwards and writings on decadence by J.K. Huysmans among them - are
unlikely to make the connection. The texts may have helped de Beer
deconstruct some complex components of sexual politics, but the imagery
they inspired fails to illuminate the murky landscape of
power-structured relationships. Nonetheless, while The Quickening is far
from resolved, it does reveal an artist will to taking risks as she
matures.